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Email Gifford Doxsee at: doxsee@ohio.edu
THIS PAGE DEDICATED TO FRAU HANNI HIPPE
ANGEL of MERCY
RETURN TO HELLENDORF
Twenty-eight years have slipped away since the writing of my letter to Ada in 1981. During that time much new information has come to me relating to my time as a Prisoner of War in Germany in 1944 and 1945. Among the highlights were the stories below about Frau Hanni Hippe, Dr. Chris Christiansen, Edward "Joe" Crone, and Michael Palaia. First, however, it is important to mention that a new book has just appeared with the collective memories of survivors of the former prisoners of war in Dresden's
Slaughter-House Five.
Entitled "Shadows of Slaughter-House Five,"
this work has been edited by Ervin Szpek, Jr. (son of one of the POWS there) and his brother-in-law, Frank Idzikowski. The late Frau Hanni Hippe and her husband owned the Gasthaus, or village inn, in Hellendorf, Germany, to which the guards took us in mid-April, 1945, when we were evacuated from Dresden because of the approaching Russian and American armies.
I had no idea at the time who owned the inn, but in 1983 Mary and I returned to both Dresden and Hellendorf, and in the latter village we met Frau Hippe who was living quietly in a lovely house adjacent to the inn. When she understood that I was one of the 150 "boys" whom the German army had billeted in their inn for nearly a month just as the war was ending, she threw her arms around me and gave me an emotional bear hug.
I returned to the United States and glibly told friends that she had treated me as a long lost son returned from the dead. Sixteen years later, in 1999, I was privileged to meet Frau Hanni Hippe a second time, this time in Dresden where she was residing in a retirement or nursing home for senior citizens. My German friend, Ruediger Mandry, was with me this time, and as he is completely fluent in both German and
English, he was able to translate for me her complete story. She and her husband had never had any biological children of their own so when the German guards placed our group of POWS (mostly young men between 19 and 22) in their inn, she bonded with us. She persuaded the guards to allow her to move the three weakest of our group out of the large room into separate bedrooms in the inn, and she scrounged extra food to keep these men alive till the war ended.
For the rest of us, she smuggled bits of food to us when the guards were not paying attention. As we were not working during those weeks and were receiving so little food that we were literally eating grass and dandelion greens, the extra nutrition that Frau Hippe smuggled to
us significantly helped our survival.
After the war in Europe ended, and we all went home, Frau Hippe heard nothing from any of us for years, and then thirty-eight years later, in 1983, I showed up one day on her doorstep. I think I was the first of our group to return to Hellendorf. No wonder that she became emotional, as did I, when she gave me that hug. She was truly a guardian angel for all of us. I am very thankful that I was able to learn her story during that second meeting just three months before her death.
During that same trip in 1983, Mary and I were privileged to visit Dr. and Mrs. Chris Christiansen in their home in Viborg, Denmark. Dr. Christiansen worked for the International YMCA during World War Two visiting POW camps in Germany and Poland, with Red Cross personnel, to insure that the German army was treating us in accordance with the requirements of the Geneva Convention.
Our compound in Dresden was one of the camps visited, so he and his team mates also played significant roles in insuring our survival. Edward "Joe" Crone, another prisoner in our group, turns out to have been the role model for Billy Pilgrim, the principal character in Kurt
Vonnegut's novel, "Slaughter-House Five." From the time that novel was published in 1969 until sometime in the 1990's, Kurt refrained from identifying Crone as the role model. When at length he informed the world of this identity, I was stunned for I had known Edward Crone as a fellow student at Hobart College before either of us entered the army.
Once in uniform, Edward and I had parallel military experiences, going through basic training, the ASTP (Army Specialized Training Program), and service in the 106th Infantry Division at Camp Atterbury, Indiana. We were never in the same company, however, so I saw little of him until we both ended up in Dresden. Crone died of starvation in a Dresden hospital one month before the war ended. I knew he had been giving his meager food away but thought until many years later that he had traded the food for cigarettes.
In the 1990's I learned from Tom Jones that Ed had never smoked and simply gave his food to others from compassion. One of the most compelling anecdotes in "Slaughter-House Five" is the story of the execution by the SS of Edgar Derby for stealing a teapot from the cellar of a bombed house in Dresden. There was no teapot and no Edgar Derby, but the anecdote is based on the execution by firing squad of Michael Palaia who had stolen an unopened jar of beans from a bombed dwelling. We were all slowly starving because of our meager rations and the
absence of Red Cross food parcels. Knowing this, our guards tacitly let us know that if we found food in cellars of bombed buildings, we could eat this so long as we carried nothing out of the cellar.
Michael's hunger led him to steal the food with the intention of carrying it back to our lodging where he hoped to consume it late at night after the rest of us were asleep. He probably would have succeeded in his plan had there not been an unexpected inspection by units of the SS just as he was climbing over the rubble from the courtyard to the street. A suspicious SS soldier inspected his field jacket, found the beans, and reported Palaia as a looter. Looting in wartime is considered a capital offense by international law, so a few days later Michael was executed by firing squad.
Four members of our group were obliged to dig the grave and bury
Michael whose death made such an impression that all members of our group
remembered this vividly.